| Occasionally, I get a letter from someone who is in 'contact' with aliens. I am invited to ask them anything. And over the year's I've prepared a little list of questions. The aliens are very advanced remember. So I ask things like, 'Please provide a short proof of Fermat's Last Theorem'. I write out the simple theorem equation with the exponents. It's a simulating exercise to think of questions to which no human today knows the answers, but where a correct answer would be recognised as such. It's even more challenging to formulate such questions in fields other than mathematics. Perhaps we should hold a contest and collect the best responses in '10 Questions to Ask an Alien'. |